Thursday, January 08, 2015

Reflection after solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

After solidarity, reflection. I’ve noticed two tendencies in
the responses to the mass murder of the Charlie hebdo artists. The first is
pretty much the total theme of Andrew Hussey’s rather astringent column in the
NYT. According to this theme, the journal went too far. Hussey enlivens the
usual complaint by pursuing two different and contradictory complaints. One is
that they were past their shelf life, old 68s – as he points out, Wolinski was guilty
of being 80. Hussey implies that 80 was about the median age of the editorial
board to make the point that this irresponsible May spirit has now been totally
discredited. The other complaint, though, makes them totally relevant, creating
threats to the French abroad and being hated by the whole of the immigant
banlieux.

Hussey sees, with justice, that the immigrant banlieux have
a lot to justly complain about. The
other tendency, which one expected – such being the moronic inferno of this
world – is that Charlie Hebdo was defending our civilization. With the
implication that there is another thing outside our civilization, which is a
buncha murderous Islamofascists who need to be taught a good lesson.

We don’t really have to dwell too long on the assimilation
of Charlie Hebdo to the rightwing imperialist shitheads. It was a magazine of
satire that devoted itself to a violent anticlericalism that was anything but
friendly to “our civilization”. I think they would have agreed with a bon mot
attributed to Brecht that civilization is such a good idea we should try it
some time.

The first criticism is more interesting. In a sense, I
think my problem with Charlie Hebdo’s
bare bummed Mohammeds and such is that they did not go far enough. Being
anti-clerical, I think, blinded them to the deeper level of humor to be derived
from the utterly hypocritical coordination of the “west” and the “Islamic
fanatics.” In truth, what we have seen for the last eighty years is the
cultivation, for quite cynical reasons, of a form of Islam dominant in the
Arabian peninsula. That form of Islam is a product of the nineteenth century,
not of the seventh century. Its aim is to dominate and purge the Islamic world
of the thousands of intersecting Islamic sects. In this, it was, until the
1960s, successful only in the restricted area of the Arabian peninsula, and not
even thoroughly there. But what happened then is that the west decided that
these powers would be very useful in the two-fold task of fighting Arabic
Nationalism and Middle Eastern communism.

And thus began the hilariously sick comedy of the Western
double standard: human rights for, say, totalitarian Russia, and cat licks and
giggles for totalitarian Saudi Arabia. In the late seventies, with Iran becoming
undone, the West had a new enemy, and agreed, as though this were the best
thing in the world, to turn a blind eye as the Gulf states, flush with cash,
planted and surplanted Mosques throughout the world. The first target of those
mosques was… other mosques. Centuries old traditions and cults were brutally
attacked. In the nineties, one saw this in, for instance, Chechnya, a country
were the predominant Sufi Moslems became the victims of their so called allies,
Moslem paramilitaries financed by Saudi Arabia, who tried to institute the
thing called “radical Islamic rule” – except of course when that is the rule of
our oil producing allies.

By never going beyond Mohammed’s bare bum, Charlie Hebdo
failed to exploit the riches of the sinister and farcical alliance. Take, for
instance, last year. The French foreign ministry was in a lather about civil
rights in Putin’s Russia. It is a place where a tax avoiding but democracy
talking billionaire doesn’t have a chance! Meanwhile, of course, in Saudi Arabia,
France’s ally, there was a beheading and
anti-witchcraft campaign going on, with at least forty guest workers, mostly
from Indonesia, mostly maids, sitting on death row for casting spells. Remember
when Qaddaffi kidnapped the Belgian nurses? That was a crime against humanity.
But Saudi Arabia, oh, well, can’t fuck up the oil supply, can we? The French Foreign minister, Fabius, has
spoken out about Pussy Riot and extended best wishes to Khodorkovski, but when
it comes to Ati Abeh Inan, the Indonesian maid who spent ten years on death row
in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft, silence at the Matignon. I would think here is the tender spot for
placing a little comic dynamite. But I think this was beyond the vision of
Charlie Hebdo – it was where they didn’t go. It would be going too far, after
all, to basically mock the West for complicity in the murders of Indonesian
guest workers by our allies, or for trampling into Bahrain, or for supplying
all the money in the world to the Islamic “radicals”.
Drive a car, and support an ISIS paramilitary for another day – this is
of course what it comes down to.

Still, you targets
what you can hit, as they say. They were a nervy band and their absense is a
huge hole, into which, as we know, imbeciles and cretins from the right will be
crawling for a long time.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.